How to prepare your organization for managing a crisis caused by a cyber attack

Cyber Crisis Management: Readiness, Response and Recovery  

In today’s digital age, no organization can be 100% certain that they will not be hit by a cyber-attack. The arms race between attackers and protectors, leaves room to assume that even with the best protections in place, a cyber-attack is a probable scenario for any organization. Every organization should be prepared for managing and responding to such an event.  Effective cyber crisis management involves managing incidents before, during, and after they occur.

1. Key Success Factor – a cyber-attack is not only an IT event. Involve all company functions: To effectively handle cyber-attacks, organizations must involve all departments, not just IT. Train and prepare all teams: legal, compliance, communications, operations, IT, and cybersecurity to prevent and respond to incidents. This approach will ensure you meet compliance requirements, maintain customer and stakeholder trust, and maintain business continuity.
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2. We see these pillars as the foundation to a successful response to cyber-attacks:

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1. Readiness

· Preparation is crucial. A multi-functional team should be established, focusing on what to prepare and how to respond. This team should undergo routine training, simulations, and assessments to ensure readiness.

2. Response

· A timely, vigorous, and coordinated response can prevent significant damage. Clear communication with stakeholders, including customers, partners, and regulators is essential to maintaining trust and managing the situation effectively.

3. Recovery

· After an incident, it's essential to review the cause and management of the incident.Learning from the event helps improve protection measures and response strategies for future incidents.

3. Key Areas of Incident Response

Planning a strategy for responding to cyber-attacks could be overwhelming. We recommend consulting with experts who will help you design a plan that will fit the needs for your organization. Plena Solutions would be pleased to support you in this journey. That said, we believe that the following topics should be at the top of mind when considering a strategy of response to cyber-attacks.

a.  Governance

- Clear roles responsibilities: Establish clear roles and responsibilities across all areas. Everyone should know in an instance – who’s in charge of what? what should everyone be doing as soon as it’s clear that a cyber-attack occurred.

- Collaboration: Develop processes for collaboration and cross-functional communication. It’s not enough that every individual and department know and do their role – orchestrating the different efforts within the organization is key for a successful and fast recovery.  

- Key Questions: Do you have the right team in place? What should be reported to whom and when? Are you testing and simulating responses enough? Are you incorporating lessons learned from previous attacks, or recent attacks on other organizations?

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b. Strategy

- Prioritize actions and processes by importance and criticality – a cyber-attack is a stressful event for everyone, especially for a management of an attacked organization. Setting a process reflecting organizational priorities can help prevent ‘tunnel vision’ and make sure you act according to priorities, and not just by flow of events, during a cyber-attack.

c. Technology

- Design your tech stack to balance between protection and pro-active threat hunting.

- Understand that IT protection does not prevent 100% of cyber-attacks.

- Don’t underestimate the importance to collecting evidence of potential cyber-attacks.They are a key component for responding to an event. Ensure IT systems are designed to preserve logs and other evidence of cyber-attacks.

d. Business Operations

- Resume critical business operations as quickly as possible to minimize disruptions.

- Define alternative delivery models and processes ahead of time.

- Key Questions: What business processes are most critical? What alternative systems, platforms, and networks do you have?

e. Risk and Compliance

- Assess compliance requirements and necessary reporting to law enforcement and government agencies.

- Manage risk, compliance, and legal functions effectively.

f. Remediation

-  Remediation of vulnerabilities that were exposed in the attack, should begin as soon as possible after the attack, in parallel to resuming critical business operations.

4. Summary 

It has become a mantra in the cyber-security world, but it is true – an occurrence of a cyber-attack, even when having the best protections in place, is more a question ‘when’ (an attack will happen) and not a question of ‘if’ (an attack will happen).

In order to be prepared for the option of the ‘when’ becoming a reality, every organization needs an effective crisis management plan. Effective cyber crisis management involves readiness before the crisis occurs, response to the crisis when it unfolds, and recovery post-crisis. Every Organization needs to prepare a multi-functional team, ensure it has a robust and clear response strategy, and learn from incidents to improve future protection. Regular reviews and updates to the crisis management plan are essential to adapting to the evolving threat landscape.

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